


The Division of a Soul (And Other Mathematics)

by hashtagartistlife



Category: Bleach
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-22
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:40:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24858526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hashtagartistlife/pseuds/hashtagartistlife
Summary: It wasn't that dead people didn’t inherently have daemons, or that they didn’t know or understand what they were. It’s just that the afterlife was a long, long time, time enough to forget and get used to practically anything— time enough to forget what it was like to literally wear a piece of your soul outside your body. // Bleach x Daemons AU
Relationships: Kuchiki Rukia/Kurosaki Ichigo
Comments: 8
Kudos: 28





	1. Subtraction

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons are a concept borrowed from Phillip Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' universe. Basically: 
> 
> 1\. Daemons are a manifestation of someone's soul in animal form. All living humans have a daemon, and if they don't, it's considered a horrifying anomaly, like seeing someone walking around without a head. When the human dies, their daemons disappear into a wisp of dust. 
> 
> 2\. Daemons are usually of the 'opposite' sex to their human (i.e. if the human is male, the daemon will be female, and vice versa). Occasionally, there are people with same-sex daemons, but this is rare. 
> 
> 3\. Daemons can only go a certain distance (usually only a few metres) away from their humans and vice versa, and if they try to get any further away it causes both daemon and human intense pain. 
> 
> 4\. Daemons can touch and interact with other daemons, but humans touching daemons other than their own is considered a huge taboo, to the point that you wouldn't even sink that low during wartime. The exception is for children too young to know better, and in private, between lovers. 
> 
> 5\. Daemons of children can shapeshift into any animal form they like. Around the age of puberty (12-16 years old), the daemons 'settle' into one fixed form, and they lose the ability to shapeshift. The settled form of the daemon will usually reflect the character of their human. 
> 
> 6\. Occasionally, daemons may settle earlier than 12-16 years old, in forms that do not adequately reflect their human's personality. This is usually due to intense shock and trauma.

Ichigo’s daemon settles early. _There_ , in the shock of his mother’s death, her golden retriever daemon Alonso nowhere to be seen, Serafin keens, a bloodcurdling mourning sound torn from her throat as he sits numb in the rain.

He doesn’t know how long it is until her anguished shrieking attracts help, but when the paramedics arrive, take his pulse, ask his daemon to change shape (a standard procedure to check for shock in children), she flits about his head in chaotic distress and refuses to listen. The paramedics try to calm her down—one of them has got a golden warbler daemon, who keeps pace with Serafin and murmurs at her in soothing tones as she circles and circles and _circles_ —but it’s no use, and when she attempts to shift, but _can’t,_ it only makes the situation worse.

_Ichigo—Ichigo—_ she thinks at him desperately, and it’s only then that Ichigo realises what the sick feeling at the bottom of his stomach is. He feels a tugging at his chest, but it’s short-lived, like running abruptly into a wall—nothing like the full-on swoop that usually accompanies a change in Serafin’s shape, and he knows this is it for them.

“I can’t—I can’t—“ he tells the paramedics who are poking and prodding him, helping him up, loading him into the back of the ambulance—“I can’t, I can’t, it’s my fault, I can’t—“

“His daemon,” one of them says shortly, and the others all stop, looking at each other with fearful, understanding eyes.

_Shock_ , they murmur, and Ichigo hears the voices around him, muffled as if through a veil but with odd patches of lucidity: _settle… early sometimes, if… trauma… nine?? I’ve never heard…. So early… too early._

_Poor boy_ , he hears, and decides to hear no more.

Mechanically, he lets the paramedics handle him as they will: they lay him on a stretcher, wrap him up in the blankets tight. He clutches Serafin close to his chest, and he can feel her tiny heart beat over his; her small warmth does nothing to dispel the chill that has settled over them both. He’s still as the grave, but Serafin is trembling.

Settling was supposed to be a joyous event, a homecoming; it was looking at a piece of your soul and, in a moment of clarity, understanding who you were and who you were going to become and being better for it. It was not supposed to be _this_ , this forced choice before he had ever considered what shape she might take, shocked into it by grief and guilt and frozen in a form that will always remind him of the pure agony of tonight.

Nightingale. Serafin’s a nightingale, with a high sweet voice and a small sleek body and wings feathered by plumes delicate as gossamer, the last form Kurosaki Masaki ever saw her in.

Shaking, weeping, her thoughts an incoherent jumble in his mind, Serafin presses herself closer to Ichigo’s body, and the two of them begin their long vigil.

* * *

His father is far more understanding than he has any right to be, him and his rangy lion-daemon Lyrani with their understanding eyes and understanding hugs and understanding _silences_ , and it’s more than Ichigo can bear. He wishes they would yell at him; he wishes they would cast him out. It’s all his fault, all of it, he’s the one who pulled mom away from the centre of their house; but the most they show in front of him is a quick grim tightening of the mouth, as though they’d somehow been expecting the news and the paramedics with her bloody corpse is only a confirmation of the worst. He wants to rail at them _—don’t you understand, don’t you get it, Mom is gone, why are you so calm_ —but he knows he doesn’t even have the right to do _that_ , not when he’s the reason she’s gone in the first place. 

It almost destroys him to watch his sisters crumble at the news, barely five and with their daemons still shapeshifting like quicksilver; Karin’s Zenka shifting so fast he’s almost a blur, Yuzu’s Inari trying valiantly to hold onto Alonso’s golden retriever shape but slipping around the edges so that every so often he’d have horns or scales or wings. But none of them blame him for it, either, and when they come to him for comfort, crying into his shirt and Serafin’s feathers, he pats them awkwardly around their shoulders and doesn’t meet the eyes that are too full of the trust and love he doesn’t deserve.

_I killed her_ , he thinks, and Serafin agrees:

_We killed her._

“I’m sorry it had to be this way, son,” his dad tells him a few days afterwards, and Ichigo doesn’t ask how he knows—he just _does_. Lyrani looks at him with her steady gold eyes and does something Ichigo only remembers from his earliest years: she pads up to him, footfalls soft on the carpet, and nuzzles her head into his cheek, licking him from chin to forehead.

He used to giggle at this, he recalls, pretending disgust and running away so that she’d chase him throughout the house. Now, he runs away for a different reason: the sunlight on her golden fur, so much like Alonso’s, and he knows it’s his fault that he’ll never see Lyrani curl up with another warm body in a patch of sunlight on lazy afternoons. 

_We killed her,_ he thinks, in litany and in time with his feet hitting the pavement, and the rush of the bloated monsoon-season river beside him does not stop to tell him otherwise. 

* * *

Three months later, in a hospital corridor, another boy’s daemon settles; early, far too early for it to approximate anything close to _normal._ The small green snake winds her body up the boy’s arm, and he clutches her closer to his chest. In the spillover of the stark white operation lights, what scant colour they have bleaches out to a ghostly transparency, so much so that he can no longer tell which of them is living and which of them the corpse. 

At least until the first incision is made. Then, the blood: not spurting and fresh and vital-red, but even more horrible in its viscosity; the dead colour of it, like the mudslide that had happened by the riverbank only a few days ago. The boy wets his lips and tries one last time. 

“Dad?”

The white ragdoll cat by the foot of the operation table doesn’t stir. His father only spares him a single glance; one that pierces through boy and daemon, rooting them in place. They can’t look away now. 

The two of them watch the dissection of their mother, the entire, bloody thing, clinging to each other all the while.


	2. Division

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_ Six years later _

_. _

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The first thought that occurs to Ichigo is: she’s an awfully brazen thief. 

Then, the second thought that occurs to him:  _ she doesn’t have a daemon.  _

The second thought is rather more shocking than the first; living people don’t just  _ not _ have daemons. That’s an impossibility, an irrationality; a warping of the way the world is meant to be. Living people can’t  _ not _ have a daemon. 

So, she’s not alive. 

Most other people would have quailed at this conclusion. Not Ichigo. He’s made that mistake once before and he won’t make it again. Just because she’s a ghost doesn’t mean she can’t be a thief— and it also doesn’t mean he  _ won’t _ kick her ass. She’s picked the wrong house to try to burgle tonight. 

A brief but animated scuffle ensues. His dad intervenes and is generally useless. Ghost girl tells him she’s part of some dead secret service that kills monsters (bull _ shit) _ and puts supernatural restraints on him when he doesn’t believe her ( _ bitch _ ). 

And then, just because Ichigo’s life is a constant one-upmanship of Murphy’s Law, said monster appears and starts decimating his family. 

His third thought for the night: ghost girl is  _ tiny. _ She is possibly even smaller than his sisters and yet there she is, drawing a sword out of nowhere, telling him to stay in his room like a good boy and not get in the way— 

_ Motherfuck, _ is that  _ Karin _ lying bloody in the hallway?

The next few moments are a blur for him. He vaguely recalls Serafin shooting past him, a meteor of rage and feathers, the both of them tearing through ghost girl’s restraints like a hot knife through butter. Somewhere along the way, he must have picked up a baseball bat, because in the next moment he’s swinging it at the monster’s face and being knocked backwards into a telephone pole. Ghost girl appears with her sword, still resolutely daemon-less, and between her and the monster Ichigo can’t tell which is more unsettling. And then he remembers ghost girl didn't knock him into a telephone pole, and decides to go with the monster. 

Then ghost girl falls, too, and it’s just him and her and Serafin and the monster lumbering in the background and a sword pointed at his chest, bearing a decision that is not a decision at all. 

“It is not  _ shinigami,” _ ghost girl says, half a smile on her face; “it is Kuchiki Rukia.” 

“Kurosaki Ichigo,” he says.

“Serafin,” his daemon nods from where she’s perched on his shoulder. 

“Let’s pray this isn’t our last greeting,” they say in unison, and then the world dissolves in fire and heat. 

Kurosaki Ichigo’s last thought for the night, as he collapses into Rukia's lap after cleaving the monster in half: whether those are tears or raindrops on her face, and just what on earth he could possibly have done to make her look so  _ sad. _

  
  


* * *

When he wakes up again, he's inches from death-by-smelly-feet. 

“I--CHI-- _ GOOOO!” _ his loon of a dad sing-songs, and Ichigo, honed by years of his dad’s lunacy, piledrivers him into the ground by his face. At the doorway, Lyrani winces. 

“You’re the one who didn't stop him,” Ichigo says accusingly. Lyrani chooses to ignore that.

Serafin shakes free of the bedcovers she'd been trapped under and flits over to inspect the situation. “But— but, the injuries—” she says, hovering over Isshin, and that's when Ichigo notices it too. 

“What about your injuries?” he demands of Isshin, and Isshin just looks nonplussed. 

“Injuries? What injuries? When did I get injured?”

“You— what about last night—”

“Ah!” his father's face lights up as though they’re finally speaking the same language. “So you  _ did _ wake up for that ruckus! And you didn't even think to come downstairs, huh? I tell you, no use having a son in the house, absolutely no use at all—”

Ichigo lets his dad babble on with a sound of disgust and stomps out of the room, since he’s clearly not getting answers from him anytime soon. He finds the twins downstairs, looking at a giant hole in their living room wall. He catalogues no broken bones, no bruises, no trauma in their expressions and wonders if he might be going just a little bit mad. 

He looks at Karin for an explanation, and she shrugs. Her daemon (in the form of a small, lazy black cat today) takes up the story for her. “Truck crashed into the side of our house last night. Car and driver got away scott-free. Well, at least the house is insured.”

The explanation is typical Karin and Zenka (short), but he gets the gist. Through the ruined wall, he sees Mizuiro waving at him from the pavement. He waves back weakly, and Mizuiro points to the destruction, expression curious. Ichigo only offers him a shrug, and then Isshin shoots past him, seemingly recovered. Ichigo decides to leave the excuses— however unbelievable they may be— to his father, and turns away to get ready for school. 

“A  _ truck?” _ Serafin queries, low and conspiratory. Ichigo scowls. 

“Hell if I know.” He pauses in the kitchen to see the bar stools— distinctly and viciously ruined in last night’s scuffle— restored to their former not-so-glory. He can even see the chip he made in one of them when he was twelve, having accidentally dropped an entire set of plates on it. A truck crashing into their house last night made absolutely no sense as an explanation— but then again, it’s not like what  _ really _ happened was the height of sensical anyway. 

“Do you think she made it out okay?” Serafin asks, a touch of anxiety colouring her voice, and Ichigo doesn't need to ask who  _ she _ is. 

“Well, if last night was real, then it looks like she was ok enough to somehow heal everyone and fake a truck crashing into our house, so she's probably fine,” he mutters, but Serafin doesn't look all that comforted by that, and to tell the truth, neither is he. 

When he manages to make his way to school, he finds Mizuiro and Tatsuki in the middle of a conversation about him, the latter well on her way to forming some pretty dire misconceptions. 

“A  _ truck?!  _ Then is he injured or  _ dead- _ -"

“Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not dead. And that's my seat you're in.” He directs the last part to Altair, Tatsuki’s golden eagle daemon, who squawks in indignation and takes off. 

“Ah, Kurosaki-kun! G-good morning!” 

Inoue waves a cheery hello as he pulls out his seat, her sugar-glider daemon— Ichigo can't remember his name, it was something long and fancy sounding— clinging to her hair. His reply is a beat late and a little bemused.

“Y-yeah? You're as bright as ever.” He sits down and starts pulling books out of his bag. “Yo, Mizuiro, what's third period today?”

“Social studies.”

“Oh. I didn't bring my textbook, but that’s fine, Miss Ochi doesn't care--"

“You’re Kurosaki-kun…?” a new voice interrupts him, and Ichigo finally pays more attention to the fact that he has, apparently, been assigned a new seating partner. There is an unfamiliar daemon draped across the table next to his, something small and furry— a hare? A rabbit? He's always been terrible at telling them apart— grooming itself with dainty licks. It flicks a cool look up at him, and looks supremely unimpressed with what it sees. 

“Ichigo.” Serafin hisses in his ear, nudging him under his hair rather insistently.  _ “Ichigo, holy shit.” _

“What?” he mutters, distracted by the utter indifference of the new daemon. How does something so small ever get to be so haughty? 

Serafin pecks him, and he startles. “OW!” 

“Nice to meet you,” his new partner tries again, amusement evident in her voice. Ichigo looks up, and freezes. 

“Oh,” he agrees. “Holy shit.”

Kuchiki Rukia smiles at him, completely at ease, one hand extended towards him in a handshake, the other idling in the fur of her  _ brand new daemon. _

**Author's Note:**

> I know it seems like i just keep throwing new fics on here without actually finishing any of my old ones but trust me, I'm not neglecting my other fics just to start new fics. All these new fics are just stuff I've written in the past and never posted. I figure if it's going to languish, it can at least languish online where other people can read it too instead of just in my google drive.


End file.
